Don’t Call Me Professor!
John Boe
As someone who has been teaching full time o* the tenure track at the University
of California, Davis, since !+,!, I am grateful for David Bartholomae’s
“Teaching on and o* the Tenure Track: Highlights from the ADE Survey of
Sta-ng Patterns in English” (see pages .–(& of this issue), which is a careful,
fair, and thorough discussion of the sta-ng of English courses in the
United States. And I am especially grateful that David has asked me to write
a response to this piece. That he would ask a nontenured person to respond
is typical of his fair- minded approach.
First of all, I want to talk about what to call me, what this report
necessarily calls me and others like me — minority groups lacking power
are often sensitive about the nomenclature supplied by those in power. And
so, at the risk of seeming petty, I must admit that I do not like being called a
non- tenure- track faculty (NTTF) member. To me it echoes the phrase “nonwhite.”
After an almost thirty- year career, I do not like that the only way to
refer to me seems to be in terms of what I am not.

Girls Just Want to Get Mad: Female Anger in Children’s Literature ﻿﻿﻿﻿ In the summer of 1997, I gave a lecture at a Susanville, California library as part of a state-sponsored program to bring UC faculty to remote communities. Only eight people showed up for my talk, but they seemed interested and lingered for conversation. [...]

I want to begin with two poems by William Butler Years, one of my favorite poets, poems I quite like but think are wrong headed. The first, “Politics,” has as an epigraph a statement by the German novelist and in my opinion giant windbag, Thomas Mann: `In our time the destiny of man presents its [...]